Tamagotchi ROM dump and reverse engineering

Often the true key to success is persistence and that holds true for this project which dumped the ROM from the current generation of Tamagotchi toys. If you’re a fan of learning the secrets built into consumer electronics — and you know we are — you’ll want to go back and watch the 24-minute lecture on Tamagotchi hacking which [Natalie Silvanovich] gave a 29C3 last year. She had made quite a bit of headway hacking the playable pods, but wasn’t able to get her hands on a full ROM dump from the General Plus chip on board processor. This update heralds her success and shares the details of how it was done.

As we learned form the video lecture it was a huge chore just to figure out what processor this uses. It turned out to be a 6502 core with a few other things built in. After prowling the manufacturer’s website she found example code for writing to Port A. She was then able to execute her own code which was designed to dump one byte of ROM at a time using the SPI protocol.

[Natalie] posted her code dump if you’re interested in digging through it. But as usual we think the journey is the most interesting part.

You’re probably better cracking a new one. Better features, and weren’t the first ones supposed to be worth millions to tiny keyring-panderers of the future?

I was quite pleased to get a couple of them, the last two in the Woolworths in the only town that seemed to have any. One for my sister, since they didn’t talk to each other or anything. They were silly but simple enough to have a sort-of appeal to them, the minimalism retro-style. Monochrome 48×32 (I think!) and 3 carbon-pad rubber buttons that couldn’t have been smaller or cheaper made.

In the end I left it behind in a house move, along with a load of old and great computers. Managed to take one of the PETs with me, with the dual full-height disk drives. It was a 96K Super-PET, I later discovered. I think I once got it to boot up a game or two. Them big giant dots on the floppy disks don’t fade away easily.

I left the PET, when I had to move 300 miles. It had made a great TV stand / conversation piece! You could even turn it on and let people’s kids play with it. Pressing the buttons and seeing stuff come up on screen was excellent entertainment for the 3 and 4-year olds my friends had at the time.

In other wierd computers, I recall a luggable with an orange plasma screen that booted into some sort of Minix or other Unix clone. I never got past the login, it was some sort of multi-user server. Keyboard flipped down from one side, it was on a cord. There was a handle (I think!) on top and it weighed a damn ton! Pretty soon it stopped booting altogether. I know very little about it. Any ideas what it might’ve been?

Probably a Compaq Portable III. Gas plasma screen with a 20mhz 386. Came with Xenix installed (Microsoft’s gander at unix). I can’t into unix so I put dos 6.22 on it and installing a SoundBlaster/Ether16